Geoffrey Spear wrote: >That list distinguishes Cyan and Teal, too. Yes. It's more a list of colour names than of colours per se. Precisely, it's a list of encyclopaedia articles on specific colour terms. It gets to distinguish terms that are used in different contexts, even if they refer to the same thing. See fuschia and magenta for another synonymous pair. The articles on fuschia and aqua both note the aliasing, and the article on teal includes the description "dark cyan".
>your supposedly canonical list? Hey, I don't claim any canonical status. I claim that it's a list of distinctly-named, abbreviatable, reasonably distinct colours. I claim that selecting from it is easier than trying to find colours and colour names that meet these criteria without it. >Can a colorblind player insist that Red and Green are synonyms E can try, but I think we're implicitly applying roughly the consensus human colour model. We're extending it a bit with infrared and ultraviolet, of course. Hypothetically we could get a tetrachromatic human player, who perceives a four-dimensional colour space and makes colour distinctions that most of us cannot. Or a rabbit, who has seven primary colours, all of them green. (Seriously.) I think we'd reject the colour distinctions that those hypothetical players could make too. > After all, color is merely our perception of light, not an innate >property of objects. I don't accept the extreme subjective-qualia philosophy that you allude to here. There certainly are physical properties involved here: the frequency spectrum of light flux, and the reflectance spectrum of objects. The kind of colour model that we're talking about here is a representation of the typical human perception of these physical properties. This colour model, with the RGB primaries, does have an objective validity as a model of human visual processing. It's species-specific, but that's the only arbitrary choice involved. -zefram
